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I’m rather interested in etymology myself. A brief google search turned up http://www.kanjinetworks.com/index.cfm though I’m not entirely sure how informative it is. A sample search got me some kinda self-referential etymology…
In the absence of any actual etymology, I tend to make it up myself, for ease in memorising. For example, 着る is the sheep radical (羊) over the eye radical (目), so it kinda shows pulling the wool over one’s eyes… which is what one does when they put on a woolen jumper. Of course, that doesn’t help for the same kanji’s other reading 着く (つく) which means “to arrive”. Similarly, 掛ける has about a thousand meanings, one other of which is “to make a phone call”, but to me the kanji kinda looks like a side-on view of two frame hooks hammered into a wall, and a picture frame hanging on the hooks. Hanging, you see? =)
While I can’t say I’ve ever heard 巻く or 締める as clothes-putting-on verbs before (I was taught just plain old する for accessories), as just plain old “to tie”, it’s worth noting that the left-side radical for 締 is the thread radical (糸), while the bottom right is a cloth (巾). The top right is a slightly modified stand (立), but I’m not really sure what to make of that. Maybe… when you’re tying a knot in a cloth, you have to stand on one end to pull it tight?
Aye, be careful of homophones. Even my Japanese lecturer has accidentally mistyped 思い as 重い (both are read as おもい) and vice versa, on more than one occasion. =P
In any case, good luck with your goals.
Welcome! Just…
有賀と
Sorry, but is this supposed to be ありがとう? Lesson one: be careful when using IME – the kanji suggested is not always the one you think it is. And that’s assuming you’re typing the kana right – if you misspell or leave something out, you’re going to get a suggestion that’s completely off. ありがとう is almost invariably written in kana, and if you were to use kanji, it’d be 有難う.
=)
Also, don’t want to discourage you, but if you’re aiming to be hired by a Japanese firm, you’d better be extremely good at architecture if you’re hoping to be hired in place of a native Japanese speaker. That basically applies for any jobs besides English-speaking ones. If you’re working for a foreign company and hoping to put in for a transfer, that might be a different matter. =)
Looks like you’ve been caught in a situation where he’s updated one page, but not another. Originally, Koichi sorted the radicals by the number of strokes in the radical – that is the “one-stroke radicals” which he was expecting you to learn were all of the radicals that contained only one stroke.
Now, however, he’s changed the sorting of the radicals into groups, where the radicals in group N are the ones you need to know in order to learn the kanji with N strokes. For example, the group-4 radicals (along with groups 1 through 3 learnt previously) are the ones that comprise the four-stroke kanji.
The moral of this story is: just learn the radicals. If you can learn the kanji too, it’d help for upcoming lessons, but this checkpoint isn’t asking you to go quite that far. =)
You got an example sentence of this usage?
The て-form of verbs also means “and then” – as in, 食べて、サッカーをします = eating, and then playing soccer – but I’m not at all sure if that’s what you had in mind.
I’ll agree with you that military games are more likely to use technical terms, but I wouldn’t rely on the characters in any games to speak the way normal people do. I reckon it’s worth setting them as a goal, and they ought to be a good source of vocab, but I wouldn’t rely on them as a learning material.
Apparently, though, the Pokemon games are fairly easy to study from, since they’re got furigana (and a kana-only option). If I recall correctly.
The button is broken, though. Doesn’t do anything for me either.
“Who” =P
Anyway, as someone who’s been to Japan with just the occasional word of Japanese, plus a phrasebook and charades – we got by, but knowing Japanese certainly would have helped. If nothing else than because I would have understood a station announcement on the first night, and so wouldn’t have had to spend ten thousand yen on a taxi. =)
Aspergers here too. I never thought I was good at learning languages (have done Italian, French and Chinese at various times at school and remember almost none of them) but I seem to be doing fairly well at Japanese.
Being able to get in speaking practice would be a great help. My weakest area is listening by far, and I’m sure getting more practice in would have helped there…
Works with Microsoft IME and the iPhone/Pad Japanese keyboard too.
That said, when was it ever romanised as “dtsu”?
Koichi’s no master, just the destroyer of the Japanese language learning industry. Feel free to do whatever works best for you.
Other than learning bad habits, anyway. =)
Apparently, you typically use 一千 when it comes right before 万 or other powers of ten thousand – so 一千万 has the 一, but not 千百万. I’m no authority on the subject, though – vaguely wondering if it’s like the difference between “a thousand” and “one thousand” in English.
Speaking of the powers of ten thousand, though, they’re always preceded by 一 even when there’s only one of it. 一万, 一億, 一兆 et cetera.
Kinda. According to my textbook, んだ (or んです) creates “harmony and shared atmosphere”, though doesn’t really explain why – it kind of seems like it creates harmony simply because everyone knows that’s what it means.
It’s also used to elicit or give further information – for example, あまり食べないんですね means “you don’t eat much”, but also implies “and why not?” without being so crass as to ask directly. In question words, like 何してるんですか or どうしたんですか it acts to soften the question and make it more friendly.
In text (and occasionally in speech) it becomes のだ/のです, and sometimes even just の, as in どこ行くの?
Don’t stress too much – close enough is generally good enough. Also, keep in mind that recorded versions may be suffering from a bit of degradation, especially if it’s been compressed for uploading.
Unless you’re full-out going “yoloshiku” or “lamen”, noone’s really going to be giving you funny looks.
Yah, that’s one of the ones where Koichi’s explanation mystifies me – among other things, even though I’ve seen quite a few people describe it that way, I would not call the sound “partially D”. Koichi describes it as 75/20/5 R, L and D, so firstly, why bring up the D at all if it’s so small a percentage, and secondly, since the R is the vast majority, why would the tongue be between the L and D positions?
I’m no expert (though noone’s ever called me on my ら pronounciation) but maybe try rolling your tongue from the L position to the R position and back again, and find somewhere in the middle. Don’t worry about going “la”, because that moves your tongue out of the way, and you lose the feel. Maybe try saying “real”? What you’re looking for is a tongue shape something like when you’re saying R, but closer to the L position at the front of the mouth
